THE SURVIVALIST# 24 BLOOD ASSASSINS BY JERRY AHERN

Standard

Copyright 1992.

Nazis have managed to assault the secret bunker where Sarah Rourke and Wolfgang Mann are in cryogenic sleep. Now with Rourke’s wife in Dietrich Zimmer’s custody he receives an offer. To trade Martin Zimmer for his wife and Mann. In addition Dietrich will perform the life saving surgery to remove the bullet from Sarah’s brain. Only problem is Martin died in the last book. He decides to bluff and uses his son Michael to impersonate Martin. So the Rourkes go off to Dietrich’s headquarters in Canada to make the trade.

Once there Dietrich announces he has revived his wife and performed the surgery. There is one more condition that he has to return his wife. An underground base in New York has survived and still has a civilization. It also holds the frozen body of Adolph Hitler where the US government stored it after the war. Rourke must lead some Nazi commandos into the underground civilization to retrieve the body. So taking his friend Rubenstein and a group of Nazis penetrate the base. They find a civilization stuck in the 1950’s run by a white supremacist government. The government keeps control by manufacturing a phony war going on against hordes of Jews and blacks. To maintain the fiction they periodically kill a number of young men to stimulate casualties. Rourke finds out a much more insidious reason for Dietrich’s plan.

The story takes a very interesting turn in this book. Open war is breaking out between the Trans-Global Alliance and the Nazis who control Eden. It is also learned that Dietrich has perfected cloning and the Martin that died was actually a clone. In addition to Hitler’s body he also wants research that will allow him to download his conscious into a clone thus achieving immortality. Now I don’t know why the government would bother to save Hitler’s corpse. I would think they would just cremate it like they did with other Nazis after to war. But government does some stupid things so it is plausible.

The whole cloning thing came out of nowhere and the revelation that Martin is alive was quite unexpected. Could his wife be a clone. There is evidence that he was able to retrieve years ago samples of all the Rourke family DNA while they were in cryogenic sleep so there could be clones of all of them. Quite an interesting development for the Survivalist sage.